When a cow shits on an anthill, does the cow feel guilty? For killing all those ants in one fell poop? No. That’s absurd, right? But we humans—we feel guilty all to hell for fouling our nest. Guilt consumes us, and I’m as guilty as the next person. More, possibly. Well, enough of that.
GOD, LOOK AT THIS DAY! A day for the ages, late summer, fluffy clouds, blue sky, breeze: a day for making love by the sea. Not for getting bugged by gasbags, goobers, and gomers. Which we have in spades, thanks very much. America, America, what makes your fat head so hard? Fuck, where’s my camera? Yes, a good day to die, as we say. Or maybe cause someone to.
I’m in the Victrola coffee house and I’m totally helpless because I see things that would make good pictures, like people wearing cool stuff or horsing around with their dogs, and I’m swearing under my breath, “where’s my fucking camera? It was right here! Who took my fucking camera?” Only, beneath all that I’m wondering: Does my taking someone’s—anyone’s—picture cause their death?
No. Bullshit. It doesn’t happen that way. Things would be insane. Oh, yeah: they are insane.
Oh, here it is. Hiding under my pack. Whew. Thank God I didn’t raise my voice. And let’s face it: I’m becoming more of a nut. Have been for some long time, only now getting worse. Not that what I do—or am—is something bad. Just odd. Reverse-exhibitionism, you might call it. I won’t elaborate, because reverse-exhibitionism means concealing, not revealing, and I’m more into concealing now than ever.
I can’t say any more. Saying any more would be a violation, not merely of principles, but of who I am. So, who am I? I can’t say. But I can say this:
I’ve been in jail.
I’ve driven trains.
I’ve had precognitions.
I’ve caused three deaths. Three that I know of.
But who believes in causality like this anymore?
Nobody here right now suspects that I hold such a belief.
Nobody here knows I killed Spencer M.
He wasn’t a bad guy. But he had scraggly long hair and was kind of scruffy, and this was the mid-sixties and I was a righteous fifteen-year-old middle-class suburban kid who wore black slacks in summer and hated “hippies.” And damned if one afternoon Spencer M wasn’t there, in our living room.
I was confused.
I didn’t invite him over.
I didn’t want him there.
Hippie. Ugh.
I guess I made that clear.
And so, picking up on my disdain and right there in our living room, he asked me, in a pitiful kind of voice, “Why don’t you like me?”
It was snowing. We should have been outside playing or walking in the snow.
Instead, being a kid who hated hippies and wore black slacks in summer, I said:
“Because you’re a bum.”
“Bum” was sort of a big word with me at the time. A friend of mine said “bum” a lot, and it amused me, so I used it to deliver judgment on Spencer M, who really wasn’t a bad guy at all.
At that moment, possibly for the first time in my life, my voice sounded pitiful to me. I knew I had crossed a line. I had become something ugly. I felt like shit.
But that did not make me apologize or try to smooth things over. No, I was fifteen, so I just turned away and got on with my miserable little life, and let a great opportunity and a good guy slip away. Stupid me.
This little spoon in my cappuccino is cute and dainty, with a little Egyptian-looking palm leaf pattern on the handle. A classic little article—timeless. Timeless: must be nice. I wouldn’t mind being timeless, but being only flatulent lumps of sodden flesh and bone, we don’t get that luxury.
I think idly about my chances for an assignation. Hope, pitiful hope, that’s what our lives are all about. But hope for assignation is a long train running.
I wish I had been a better person than to call Spencer M a bum, and instead had gone out in the snow with him and walked and talked. An assignation, one that would possibly have taken my life in a different and better direction. For sure it would have for him. Instead, I turned away, and Spencer M left and walked alone out into the snow, and in the sun of the next summer walked alone out onto the I-90 freeway and got himself punted into oblivion.
Sorry, Spencer. You were only looking for assignation. But the truth is, you could have done better. For one thing, I leave a lot to be desired. In fact, really, I’m pretty much kind of a bum myself. I worked odd jobs, I never made much money, I never “amounted” to much of anything. Years ago, Dad asked me if I couldn’t do something “better” with my life.Well, gee, Dad, maybe if you had taught me some useful things about working, or used some of your connections, I would have done something “better.” But you didn’t, did you? Would have cut into the cocktail hour.
Well, anyway, kids are born to disappoint their parents. It’s what we do.
God makes us do it.
Thank you, God.
And fuck you.
I could have started doing better by being better to Spencer M. But that was a road not taken.
Fuck me.
I look around for photo material and see a startlingly beautiful woman on the sidewalk just outside. Standing there in a shaft of late-afternoon sunlight, she wears beautiful high brown boots and leggings and an elegant maroon sarape. She is an Olympian figure and would make a lovely portrait. I scrounge around in my bag and pull out my camera just as she turns and moves out of view. I hurry and gather up my stuff and go outside. She stands pat, looking majestic in her boots and tights and sarape. Why can’t men look like her?
“Hey,” I say to her.
“Hey.”
“I see you’re a fellow shooter.”
She looks me up and down. “Yeah,” she says, smiling, “are you a shooter, too?”
“Yes,” I say, smiling conspiratorially. She nods approvingly, links her arm in mine, and leads me to her place where, without either of us cluttering up the moment with a lot of words, we tear our clothes off and make love into the evening.
Ha-ha! No, it doesn’t happen that way. Of course not. In fact, she turned and strode up the street without even looking at me. I only think about things like this happening. I’m a great thinker, not so great as a doer.
I finish my coffee and walk down the street adjusting my dress for no particular reason and thinking, well, at least this—this longing, this urging, this surging vitality—proves I’m alive. While others within my purview are not.
And so: no assignation. Assignations take guts and initiative, and in that, as in pretty much everything, I remain pretty much a general failure.
Not, however, a total failure.
I have succeeded in at least one thing: causing death.
I was riding in my sister’s car on through Seattle on I-5 one night when I saw scurrying along the shoulder a black cat. “Pull over!” I cried. My sister pulled over and I got out and walked back, full of big plans to rescue the cat. I saw the cat running toward me, the cars whizzing by just a few feet to my right. I thought I would simply scoop the cat into my arms and rescue it, great. But cats are funny; they don’t just run happily to dark strangers looming up suddenly in their path. So instead of being rescued, the cat ran out into the freeway and was immediately punted into oblivion.
Two freeway deaths. Sorry kitty.
At some point during all this thinking about my success in causing death, I find I’ve moved on.
Now I’m at Ducky’s. They specialize in pastries and bagel sandwiches here; the bagels are good but the owner has this thing for oldies rock. Some sort of security blanket thing, I guess—comfort-music. I hate it. Why do we need to hear that crap again? It’s gone, dead, finish, kaput, bye-bye. Like my worldly potential to do better.
But now, suddenly, here’s a cute little song that I don’t remember ever hearing. Isn’t that weird, to hear an oldie that you’ve never heard before? Hard to grasp even the possibility of that! It sounds like it could have come out around the time of Spencer M’s death (caused by me), and makes me wonder: If I had heard it back then, would I have been nicer to him?
The question gnaws.
Then I forget it and dig into a piece of cheesecake. They make good cheesecake here.
I take a plastic fork from the tray but the owner, a small, emaciated woman with sunken cheeks, says, “Oh, here’s a real fork.” She hands me a metal one and I wonder: why have plastic ones?
Then she looks at me with her hollow, death-mask eyes and asks, point-blank, “What do you do?”
I cause death—room for one more, honey.
But I don’t say that. After all, that is not my sole mission in life. Instead, I say: “Nothing.”
She says, “Oh,” and smiles kind of funny and walks away. Let her chew on that for a while. Why should I tell some stranger what I fucking “do”? Right now, I eat cheesecake. Let me eat cake, that okay with you? Or would you rather I do nothing (but eat cheesecake and possibly cause your imminent death) somewhere else?
I have just put my mark upon her.
Well, there’s nothing for it.
I will have to live with it.
I am what I am.
It is what it is.
I wish I had my camera. Whenever I leave it home, I always see things I wish I could photograph. Oh! Here’s a man on a bike towing a smaller bike with a child on it! A girl, maybe six years old. Seems risky, but the girl looks like she’s enjoying the ride. Her expression is proud, even regal, like Marie Antoinette saying “Let them eat cake.” But then I think it might be better I don’t take her picture, given the possibility that doing so would cause her death.
Oh, wait: I do have my camera. And I just missed a good picture, again. I’ve missed very many in my day. I’ve missed a lot of things, including success.
“Success”: define that.
I define that in terms of cumulative assignations. And on those terms, the record is dismal:
Saltmarsh dance class, 1965: no assignation.
Shelly’s Leg, 1975: no assignation.
Re-bar, 1990: no assignation.
Lava Lounge, 1992: no assignation.
Café Septieme, 1995: no assignation.
Victrola: no assignation.
Bagel Dog Haus: no assignation.
Oh, and: Spencer M, 1966: no assignation.
But life moves on and so do I. I am now in Bartell Drugs, standing before the well-stocked magazine rack. It’s a beautiful rack, full of glossy publications, and I think of all the editorial staffs and production plants and editors and writers pinning their futures on whether or not people come in here and pluck their products from the rack. I am strongly moved by the sight of these bright, hopeful magazines. Buy me! they say—Buy me! Their voices are pitiful and move me almost to tears.
Sadly, though, during my several minutes here before the rack, no one buys a magazine or even come and looks. All that work, all that paper, all those painstakingly composed pictures and diligently-crafted articles: for nothing. Well, who buys magazines anymore? Everyone has smart phones and apps. I like magazines; they’re solid and comforting and offer connection with the world. But I realize, painfully, that most of these magazines will probably never be sold and will ultimately be pulped. It occurs to me, naturally, that my mere being here just may be sufficient to cause the pulping (deaths) of all these magazines and the ultimate liquidation (death) of this magazine rack. I buy two magazines but leave with no assignation.
Leaving the magazines (doomed) and the store (probably also doomed, sometime in the future) leads me to wonder: When did I acquire my death-gaze? And why?
I think this as I walk the streets and smile sheepishly at women and their babies: I, bringer of death.
I think this as I chat with my co-workers and tip the wait-staff and give PowerPoint presentations to children and others: I, carrier of death.
I have visited many people in their last years—“end times,” we call it—and they have smiled and talked and even laughed with me, their friend, completely ignorant of the yawning abyss behind my affable smile. I, harbinger of death.
It occurs to me (and not for the first time) that I’m just being a guilty cow in all this. It occurs to me that I need to pull myself together and just stop.
Now.
But first, death number three. (Not necessarily in chronological order.) In the summer of 1965, my mother had just steered us onto the highway heading over to Bellevue for some shopping. Suddenly, in the road ahead on the channel bridge, I saw a Jeep swerve across the lanes. Traffic screeched to a stop. My sister and I got out and ran up (can you imagine that—we actually got out and ran up!), and there was a crumpled Volkswagen and inside a man, bloody-faced but talking. I went back to the car and said to Mom, “I saw the man, he’s okay, he’s talking.”
The man was obviously okay—I saw him talking. I gave it no more thought. But that evening, Mom found out somehow that the man I had seen so clearly alive and talking—a Mr. O—had died. Naturally. I have no idea how Mom found out (and I wonder if she, herself, did not have some connection with the inner workings of death), but I wish I’d stayed in the car. Why did Mom let me get out? Stupid Mom. No, I can’t begrudge her. Any parent is basically lost. As for me: One, two, three freeway deaths, all caused by me. Mr. O, meet Spencer M. I hope you both like cats.
I understand that many—most, probably—people would say, oh, bullshit! There is no such causation, the world does not operate that way. Ha-ha! They would smile ghastly smiles trying to comfort me. I appreciate that. After all, I didn’t tell Spencer M to go out onto the freeway, did I? No. I did not dump the cat on the busy highway, did I? No, again. There, you’re innocent, clean, scot-free. And certainly, in the case of poor Mr. O, I cannot be blamed. I was only an innocent bystander, wasn’t I? Ah, but that’s just it: That may be true, up to a point, but what if, even then, I had gone past that point? What if the incident with Mr. O was an initiation? And, having passed through successfully, it was on to Spencer M and the cat.
I sit on a Link train going south, thinking about my future, the clothes I might have worn today, the deaths I have caused, the woman I dated once (does she ever ride the train, and what would I say if I saw her?), and the poor cat on the freeway. I think about become a Zoroastrian. In a changing world, it seems like Zoroastrianism is something that offers stability.
Stability is becoming increasingly desirable to me. This light rail is a marvel, so much superior to the old cattle-car buses. Seattle is growing wildly, and no one seems to know how to deal with it. I deal with it by acknowledging my culpability and moving on. (And by causing deaths.)
Just now, though, I’m not moving. The train is stopped at a station. I look across the track and see a family clustered on the platform around a baby stroller. One of the family, a young man, kneels and takes pictures of the baby in its stroller. Across the track, a face in a window of a passing train stares out, a pale, blurry oval. The face wonders if he will cause the death of that baby, unquantified years from now. I dismiss that thought and move on to others.
But something pulls me back. The train begins to move and I look again across the track at the little tableau on the opposite platform and see the infant’s eyes fixed on me, like lumps of coal on a snowman’s face, cold, black, lifeless.